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Rob Voigt

@robvoigt

using computational methods to understand the linguistic mechanisms of social problems | NLP, socioling, discourse-pragmatics | asst prof at UC Davis Linguistics https://robvoigt.faculty.ucdavis.edu/

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05.10.2023
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Latest posts by Rob Voigt @robvoigt

Wow, looks amazing Dallas!! Congrats!

22.02.2026 20:18 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
After two years of vibecoding, I’m back to writing by hand
After two years of vibecoding, I’m back to writing by hand YouTube video by Mo Bitar

I was just watching this video earlier today which makes a really similar point (youtu.be/SKTsNV41DYg?...). At the end of the day the buck has to stop with a human, and for researchers we have to stand behind our work. Doing so using AI code tools might be (much?) more work than just coding it!

31.01.2026 00:49 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 1

This major release of my lab's annotation tool, Potato 2.0, was a long time in the making but I'm really excited by all the new features (and quality of life improvements). If you're doing data annotation of any kind, check it out. Need any other features? We'd love to hear from you too!

29.01.2026 21:27 πŸ‘ 27 πŸ” 4 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 2
CSE 598-004 - Building Small Language Models

The second new class I'm teaching is a very experimental graduate level seminar in CSE: "Building Small Language Models". I taught the grad level NLP class last semester (so fun!) but students wanted moreβ€”which of these new ideas work, and which work for SLMs? jurgens.people.si.umich.edu/CSE598-004/

19.01.2026 21:29 πŸ‘ 32 πŸ” 9 πŸ’¬ 2 πŸ“Œ 1
PNAS Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...

After a multi-year effort led by my brilliant PhD advisee Ruth Bagley, this exciting work documenting large-scale racial disparities in media representations of gun violence is out today in PNAS: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

16.01.2026 21:42 πŸ‘ 33 πŸ” 9 πŸ’¬ 2 πŸ“Œ 0

Very excited this work is out, many great chapters including a version of the fantastic MA thesis work of my former student Michael Senko (msenko1.github.io)!

17.12.2025 22:33 πŸ‘ 6 πŸ” 2 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
Book cover of the collection entitled 'Battlefield Linguistics: Queer, Trans, and Feminist Interventions in Linguistics and Discursive Change', edited by Scott Burnett and Francesca Vigo.

Book cover of the collection entitled 'Battlefield Linguistics: Queer, Trans, and Feminist Interventions in Linguistics and Discursive Change', edited by Scott Burnett and Francesca Vigo.

πŸ’ͺ Congratulations to @burscott.bsky.social and Francesca Vigo on the publication of their impressive collection!

πŸ‘‰ Details here: www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783111351568/html#overview

@montreallx.bsky.social @kleonichka.bsky.social @helensauntson.bsky.social @robvoigt.bsky.social

17.12.2025 15:16 πŸ‘ 27 πŸ” 13 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 3
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SCiL 2026 SCiL 2026 July 3rd and 4th San Diego, CA

For everyone working on the intersections between linguistic and computational research, consider submitting to the upcoming SCiL! We're very excited that it will be co-located with ACL 2026 as a workshop, and we've also received NSF funding to help cover costs.

sites.google.com/view/scil2026

08.12.2025 23:41 πŸ‘ 20 πŸ” 10 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 1
Screenshot of a figure with two panels, labeled (a) and (b). The caption reads: "Figure 1: (a) Illustration of messages (left) and strings (right) in toy domain. Blue = grammatical strings. Red = ungrammatical strings. (b) Surprisal (negative log probability) assigned to toy strings by GPT-2."

Screenshot of a figure with two panels, labeled (a) and (b). The caption reads: "Figure 1: (a) Illustration of messages (left) and strings (right) in toy domain. Blue = grammatical strings. Red = ungrammatical strings. (b) Surprisal (negative log probability) assigned to toy strings by GPT-2."

New work to appear @ TACL!

Language models (LMs) are remarkably good at generating novel well-formed sentences, leading to claims that they have mastered grammar.

Yet they often assign higher probability to ungrammatical strings than to grammatical strings.

How can both things be true? πŸ§΅πŸ‘‡

10.11.2025 22:11 πŸ‘ 91 πŸ” 20 πŸ’¬ 2 πŸ“Œ 3

Tenure-track phonology position at UChicago!

04.10.2025 01:56 πŸ‘ 7 πŸ” 6 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 1
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Tenure-Track Assistant Professor, Sociology of Gender University of California, Davis is hiring. Apply now!

UC Davis is looking to appoint a Tenure-Track Assistant Professor in the Sociology of Gender recruit.ucdavis.edu/JPF07293

29.08.2025 10:48 πŸ‘ 10 πŸ” 8 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
Speech and Language Processing Speech and Language Processing

Now that school is starting for lots of folks, it's time for a new release of Speech and Language Processing! Jim and I added all sorts of material for the August 2025 release! With slides to match! Check it out here: web.stanford.edu/~jurafsky/sl...

24.08.2025 19:28 πŸ‘ 150 πŸ” 59 πŸ’¬ 3 πŸ“Œ 4

congrats - this looks really exciting and powerful Michael, looking forward to reading it!!

21.08.2025 21:33 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

Four papers accepted at the #EMNLP2025 main conference!
1️⃣ Thinking Out Loud: Do Reasoning Models Know When They’re Right?
2️⃣ Seeing is Believing, but How Much? A Comprehensive Analysis of Verbalized Calibration in Vision-Language Models

In these two papers, we look into...

20.08.2025 20:47 πŸ‘ 10 πŸ” 3 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

woohoo congrats!!

20.08.2025 20:14 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
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Robin Lakoff, Expert on Language and Gender, Is Dead at 82

β€œA woman using a public voice is in trouble.”

Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2025/08/15/u...

15.08.2025 23:29 πŸ‘ 61 πŸ” 12 πŸ’¬ 5 πŸ“Œ 2
Apply - Interfolio {{$ctrl.$state.data.pageTitle}} - Apply - Interfolio

UMich Ling is hiring for a cluster hire position in AI and Linguistics! Come work in a fabulous department with great grad students, supportive colleagues, and one overly school-spirited nut who will tell you where all the fun stuff is on campus.

apply.interfolio.com/171006

15.08.2025 13:45 πŸ‘ 16 πŸ” 15 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
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Leveraging Human Production-Interpretation Asymmetries to Test LLM Cognitive Plausibility Suet-Ying Lam, Qingcheng Zeng, Jingyi Wu, Rob Voigt. Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers). 2025.

I just gave a virtual presentation at ACL 2025 on our work about the production–interpretation asymmetry in reference processing in LLMs. If you’re into computational psycholinguistics or the LLMs x cognitive science space, give it a read!
aclanthology.org/2025.acl-sho...
@robvoigt.bsky.social

29.07.2025 16:21 πŸ‘ 9 πŸ” 3 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
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NYU LLM + cognitive science post-doc interest form Tal Linzen's group at NYU is hiring a post-doc! We're interested in creating language models that process language more like humans than mainstream LLMs do, through architectural modifications and int...

I'm hiring at least one post-doc! We're interested in creating language models that process language more like humans than mainstream LLMs do, through architectural modifications and interpretability-style steering. Express interest here: docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

21.06.2025 15:13 πŸ‘ 42 πŸ” 21 πŸ’¬ 2 πŸ“Œ 1
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Post-Doctoral position - Department of Linguistics University of California, Davis is hiring. Apply now!

I'm hiring a postdoc to start this fall! Come work with me? recruit.ucdavis.edu/JPF07123

30.05.2025 01:30 πŸ‘ 25 πŸ” 25 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 1

wow this looks super cool!! excited to check it out.

22.05.2025 00:52 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

congrats!!!

24.04.2025 02:05 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
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This statement from the NSF is insane.

Science is, in essence, designed to separate the true from the false.

Understanding how falsehoods spread is key to the scientific endeavor. It is not a violation of free speech to be proven wrong.

18.04.2025 20:51 πŸ‘ 2642 πŸ” 998 πŸ’¬ 98 πŸ“Œ 109
The idea that human cognition is, or can be understood as, a form of computation is a useful conceptual tool for cognitive science. It was a foundational assumption during the birth of cognitive science as a multidisciplinary field, with Artificial Intelligence (AI) as one of its contributing fields. One conception of Al in this context is as a provider of computational tools (frameworks, concepts, formalisms, models, proofs, simulations, etc.) that support theory building in cognitive science. The contemporary field of Al, however, has taken the theoretical possibility of explaining human cognition as a form of computation to imply the practical feasibility of realising human(-like or -level) cognition in factual computational systems; and, the field frames this realisation as a short-term inevitability. Yet, as we formally prove herein, creating systems with human(-like or -level) cognition is intrinsically computationally intractable.

The idea that human cognition is, or can be understood as, a form of computation is a useful conceptual tool for cognitive science. It was a foundational assumption during the birth of cognitive science as a multidisciplinary field, with Artificial Intelligence (AI) as one of its contributing fields. One conception of Al in this context is as a provider of computational tools (frameworks, concepts, formalisms, models, proofs, simulations, etc.) that support theory building in cognitive science. The contemporary field of Al, however, has taken the theoretical possibility of explaining human cognition as a form of computation to imply the practical feasibility of realising human(-like or -level) cognition in factual computational systems; and, the field frames this realisation as a short-term inevitability. Yet, as we formally prove herein, creating systems with human(-like or -level) cognition is intrinsically computationally intractable.

🚨Our paper `Reclaiming AI as a theoretical tool for cognitive science' is now forthcoming in the journal Computational Brain & Behaviour. (Preprint: osf.io/preprints/ps...)

Below a thread summary 🧡1/n

#metatheory #AGI #AIhype #cogsci #theoreticalpsych #criticalAIliteracy

16.08.2024 19:40 πŸ‘ 484 πŸ” 168 πŸ’¬ 22 πŸ“Œ 63
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Cory Booker has taken the Senate floor and plans to filibuster as long as he’s physically able to protest the complete disregard for the rule of law by Trump and Musk.

Watch here: www.c-span.org/event/us-sen...

31.03.2025 23:27 πŸ‘ 12157 πŸ” 3008 πŸ’¬ 438 πŸ“Œ 1005

We have had nearly two decades of panic about Free Speech on Campus and not a single case, not even the ones they made up, were as bad as what's happening now

29.03.2025 14:24 πŸ‘ 17743 πŸ” 6402 πŸ’¬ 171 πŸ“Œ 158
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The shame of Columbia University In surrendering to Trump, it's opening all universities to Trump's tyranny

The Shame of Columbia: violating academic freedom

β€œNot even during the communist witch hunts of the early 1950s did a university agree to put an entire academic department under special oversight because of what its faculty researched or taught.”
open.substack.com/pub/robertre...

22.03.2025 03:21 πŸ‘ 985 πŸ” 406 πŸ’¬ 32 πŸ“Œ 24
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Columbia Concedes to Trump’s Demands After Federal Funds Are Stripped The administration has moved to cut $400 million in federal funding to the university without changes to its policies and rules.

Columbia University has failed to defend academic freedom & freedom of speech & allowed a great institution to be bullied & extorted into submission by an administration hellbent on contorting higher education to their will.

The AAUP condemns this capitulation. We can & must fight back.

22.03.2025 02:32 πŸ‘ 2134 πŸ” 763 πŸ’¬ 41 πŸ“Œ 57

Looking for a PhD student to come work with me on the ethical implications of NLP from September!

Please share widely and point any interesting students my way! 😊

11.02.2025 14:57 πŸ‘ 26 πŸ” 15 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
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Sage Journals: Discover world-class research Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

Taser was a weapon company. Then it was a body camera company. Now it’s a body camera data company. @robvoigt.bsky.social and I look at some of the promises and challenges of applying natural language processing to BWC footage in a new article (1/5) journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

10.02.2025 16:40 πŸ‘ 2 πŸ” 1 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0